Friday, November 01, 2013

Playing with the future - Part 1

Some time ago I had an interesting conversation by email with my colleague and fellow Product Manager, Alexandra Popova. The subject was "How will content authors create content in 2020".

This spawned a whole series of ideas and concepts about content creation and - especially - content delivery, ensuring that the content that is shown is what you are searching for at this point in time. From there I ended up creating a Slide Deck I use sometimes with the title of "The future of content - a non-binding futuristic play". I think it's time to put those ideas out to the world and see if there's any strong disagreements.

There are 5 main "ideas" that we think will be prevalent in 2020:

Schemas will disappear (as in, you won't see the content structure anymore)

I left some out for the simple reason that by 2020 they will already be a strong reality: web content will stop being page centric (some argue that this is already the case, and I agree), content will be self descriptive and "atomic".

Anyway, let's dive into the 5 ideas that I think will be a reality in 2020.

Idea #1 - Schemas will disappear (from the editor's screen)

There will still be some niche markets (product catalogs and support documentation) where this type of interface makes sense, but as systems improve and become more reliable, you'll be more & more using "smart" content editors that derive the semantic meaning of your content for you. There will still be a schema that your content must comply to, it just won't be "in your face". And no, HTML5 is not a content schema - at most it's a page schema and a vocabulary for content. You can present structured content using HTML5, but that's a result of its flexible design.

So, what are some examples of this out there? Well, our own SDL Xopus editor, for starters. It binds to an XSD just like most XML editors, but presents it in a completely familiar way to editors used to working with "less structured" content tools like MS Word or EverNote. (go play with the demos if you don't believe me)

Furthermore, the advances being done in what was once an exclusive domain of "enterprise search" software - entity discovery and concept mapping (see the excellent Apache Stanbol as an example) - means that this type of technology is not anymore in the domain of very expensive and rare software. No, it's starting to be available to anyone with a workable Internet connection. And if I, as a content editor, can let the software discover what my content is about and tag it appropriately then I'm free to create my content and let the metadata tag itself (I obviously need to review and approve).

An interesting side effect of this is that you will not get less metadata. Au contraire, we're going to (finally?) get a lot more metadata can be used to segment our content in ways that will allow our devices to display it properly.

Systems (and people) will struggle for a while, but as leading systems pick this up and start improving on it with usage, we'll all get better for it. And devices like HUDs on cars will easily display your content, in a way that won't distract the driver from what he needs to focus on.

Next week I'll post about how I feel the concept of content ownership will slowly dilute, and distributed ownership (including from outside your firewall) will be the norm.